Forget misleading exit polls. The Washington Redskins, Burke’s Peerage and even the candidate’s height fell short when it came to forecasting the outcome of Campaign 2004. President George W. Bush’s victory over Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry in the US presidential race took the wind from the sails of a whole host of beloved election superstitions.

The taller candidate usually wins. But Kerry, at 6 feet, 4 inches (193 cm), towers over Bush, at 5 feet, 11 inches (180 cm). In every presidential election since 1936, the White House has changed hands if the Redskins lost their final home game before Election Day, and the National Football League team lost to the Green Bay Packers by 28-14, at home, on Oct. 31.

But the sporting omen was no touchdown for Kerry. Burke’s Peerage said Kerry was a distant cousin to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and had more royal blood than any presidential candidate in US history, including Bush, who has plenty of blue blood of his own. Burke’s also said the candidate with more royal blood wins. Some omens are so unusual they’re hard to ignore. Democratic pulses ran high when Boston’s – and Kerry’s – beloved Red Sox baseball team cast off a stigma more dire even than the “liberal” label days before the vote.

Surely the team’s first World Series victory in 86 years, breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” said to have been inflicted when the team sold the legendary Babe Ruth to the Yankees, would have augured well for a senator from Boston? But, not. Of course, some indicators were right on the mark. Bush Halloween masks outsold Kerry ones, proving he would be re-elected.

One venerable omen almost pinpointed the popular vote. Scholastic News, a children’s magazine that has conducted student presidential election polls since 1940, and been right in all but two of them, said its readers had picked Bush with 52 percent – he nabbed about 51 percent on Tuesday. The real soothsaying may involve domestic policy of an apolitical sort: the US magazine “Family Circle” holds a first-lady cookie recipe contest in honor of each presidential election. This year, Laura Bush’s oatmeal-chocolate-chunk cookies triumphed over Teresa Heinz Kerry’s pumpkin spice ones.

<B>Patricia Zengerle</B>